There are lots of drugs in this world. Some alleviate pain, while others alleviate conscious thought. Some help you sleep at night, while others keep you up for days. Some help you open your mind, while others prevent you from being able to spell. But there is one drug that completely rules them all. There is one substance out there that completely skews your world view so wildly that you can no longer perform the simplest of tasks. It destroys your physical image. It ruins your view of your loved ones. It turns them against you. It makes you seem like, most of the time, you're speaking a completely different language than non-users. You destroy life-long friendships and lose the ability to attract the opposite sex. Sounds terrible doesn't it? It is. The worst part is that once you start using, you lose the ability to control it. You simply have to hold on and ride it out, with only a faint wish that one day you will snap to senses. Maybe then you can repair the damage left in the wake of teenage hormones.
While in the throws of this addiction, there is no simple way out. It seems as though adulthood is some distant land that must surely be a trick that resembles a taller version of eighth grade. With every struggle to understand your new feelings and physical mutations you continually think to yourself: "is this going to be forever?" I look back at those years now and see all of the paths I could've taken. I wonder why thoughts of college or the future NEVER ranked higher on the list than second base. I could never fathom anything more interesting or mysterious than a bra strap. If there was something out there that rivaled it, I was certainly not ready to learn it.
This causes you to do crazy, and I mean CRAZY things. If I would have worked as hard at school as I did trying to garner female interest, I would have been south Mississippi's Doogie Howser. Still, I never thought that one day, my tireless effort had the ability to get me killed.
In the neighborhood of human personalities, pompous and naive are next door neighbors. One doesn't know it's an asshole, the other doesn't know there's such a thing. As I look back now, I see that most of my crazy behavior is more related to naivety. I truly never considered that consequences ever got more severe than a stern talking to.
As is always the case, this story centers around a girl. Let's call her Elise. I've never known anyone named Elise, but she seems like a nice girl already. Elise understood the mind of a teenage boy better than anyone I've ever met. She was beautiful and smart, but her devious nature, which was never too far below the surface, was the thing that truly brought all the boys to the yard. Her interests centered around Stevie Nicks, horror movies, and anything else filed under "macabre." She kept many on the line, and was truly able to make you feel that if you withstood her folly long enough she would make it worth your while. I think I always knew it was a game with her, but was never able to muster the strength to call shenanigans. For most of my high school years I hung out with my best friend Joey. We chased the same girls, listened to the same music, and shared an interest in movies.
He lived in a nearby town, that was closer to Hattiesburg, so we spent most of our time cruising Hardy street looking for trouble. We weren't troublemakers, by any stretch of the imagination, but like all teenage boys, in our minds we were half a step away from being the reincarnation of James Dean.
Being the cool cats we were, we went right along with any request Elise made, even when she requested that we sneak up on her and her mom in the walmart parking lot and "kidnap" her. To her, it was a fantastic goof on her mom. To us, her bra strap seemingly outweighed life in prison if her mom overreacted. Honestly, I remember thinking that her mom would get a kick out of it. To me, we would pull up to their car, jump out wearing masks, make it seem like we were serious, and then reveal that it was all a ruse.
So there we are, pacing the aisles of the walmart parking lot on a Friday night, wearing gorilla masks, viewing ourselves as jokesters, rather than potential kidnappers. After ten minutes or so, we didn't see Elise, so we gave up and drove away.
The hardest part about puberty is that one minute you feel like an adult whose opinions should somehow matter, and five minutes later you're back to being a kid.
After leaving walmart, we drove around for a little while and eventually stopped at the office depot adjacent to the mall. We went inside and did what any common sense adult does in an office depot, we raced up and down the desk chair aisle attempting to identify exactly which was the fasted chair. We were having so much fun that we barely noticed the police officers running up and down the outside aisles of the store. They glanced at us and kept on going. "Hmm, must've been a shoplifter," we thought. After a few more minutes, we headed to the register so Joey could purchase a fancy new pen. While waiting for the cashier to ring him up, the front sliding glass doors open and in walks a tall and quite grumpy Lamar County Sheriff's deputy. To my surprise, he's coming right for us.
"HEY! Which one of you is (Joey's full name)?" Joey whips around and says, "I am. Can I help you?" Now, my inability to type sarcasm doesn't accurately convey how Joey's response sounded. It was snarky and condescending. And while it really thrilled the officer, I got the most benefit from his tone. I was empowered!!!!
The following exchange went something like this:
Officer grumpy pants: What in the world were you doing riding around in ski masks?
Naively confident me: We weren't in ski masks.
Officer grumpy pants: You weren't?
Naively confident me: No, we were wearing gorilla masks. (hey, details count)
Officer grumpy pants: Gorilla masks? Why in the hell were you doing that?
Naively confident me: We were going to play a prank on a friend of ours.
Officer grumpy pants: What kind of prank?
Stupid, but not that stupid me: Oh nothing really. We were just going to sneak up and scare her. Plus, wearing a mask isn't against the law, is it?
At this point, officer grumpy pants' blood pressure spiked to near-stroke levels and I'd won the conversation. With every breath, he yelled more and more while I remained calm and oblivious to his threats. I told him that we didn't commit any crime and he should leave us alone. That's when he asked me a very interesting question. He said, "boy, have you ever had the barrel of a gun pressed against your head?"
My naivety lead me to believe that he was out of reason and was now just trying to "scare us straight." Didn't work. Try again meathead.
This entire time, Joey is visibly uncomfortable with my unknowingly cavalier attitude. He's using every non-verbal method possible to get me to shut up, but I wouldn't back down. As the officer walked back out of the office depot, I puffed out my chest, satisfied that I stood up to the nonsense, and kinda looked cool doing it.
As we started up Joey's dad's Bronco and pulled in to the empty Dillard's parking lot, the cops were on us before we knew what happened. All at once we were surrounded by six cop cars. Lights, sirens, and loudspeakers galore. As we stopped the truck, they all kicked open their doors, guns drawn, and began to give instructions aloud.
Cop: Turn off the ignition.
Cop: Throw the keys out the window.
This instruction led to Joey opening the door to loudly explain that he had power windows and couldn't roll them down with the ignition off. Then he shut the door.
Cop: Uhh, okay. Uhh, turn it on and roll the window down. Then off again and throw them out.
We complied. Step by step, we were instructed to leave the vehicle and place our hands on the hood. As we stood there staring at each other across the hood of the truck we laughed and joked at how and why we got to this point. Ahh yes, a girl.
In an instant Officer grumpy pants is huffing and puffing in my ear, "you're not so funny now, huh?" To which I replied, "am I under arrest for being funny?" He snarled and walked away. As they searched the vehicle they found a bag of fireworks in the trunk area. "What do you plan to do with these, huh?" "Uhh, pop 'em?," Joey replied. Just then, I heard a common phrase that haunted me to the core.
An officer off to the side said, "wait a minute, are you Dale Nolan's kid?" Oh crap.
This response personifies the teenage mind. There I was, hands on the hood and a gun in my face and nothing made a bump on the old fear needle until my dad's name was mentioned. I turned around and met my accuser. He asked me, "son, what in the world are you doing out here, and what did you do to piss off officer grumpy pants so bad?" I took a few minutes to explain our situation and that we were truly no danger to anyone. He told me that an elderly couple saw us in the parking lot and followed us to home depot while on the phone with 911. They thought we were going to kill someone. Great. Thank God grandpa wasn't packing heat. He would taken us out all by himself.
Once everything calmed down, I apologized to grumpy pants for getting him so angry, and we were once again free men.
As we walked in to Joey's house, his parents invited us to join them in the living room. It seems that when the cops ran the tag on the truck, they ran through office depot looking for his dad. They then called his house to find out who was driving the truck. He'd been on the phone with them the whole time, and knew everything that had taken place. Like something out of a bad ABC family movie, Joey's dad jerks out a huge handgun and sticks it in our faces. "How does that make you feel guys? Is that a good feeling? Are you scared NOW?"
To which Joey replied, "not really dad. It's a revolver, I can see it's not loaded." Through gritted teeth his dad growled "GO TO BED." A few seconds later, his dad came to the bedroom door and handed me the telephone. "Call your parents and tell them what happened."
The ladies and gentlemen of the screen actor's guild would've been proud of the performance I put on during my two minute fake phone call to my dad. I explained the entire thing even feigned demure as I got an imaginary earful from the other end. After a few "yes sirs" I hung up and handed him the phone. "He said I could stay, but that I need to come home first thing in the morning."
As his dad closed the door, our minds shot back to the most pressing question resulting from tonight's escapades. "Where the heck was Elise?"
Yes, I do fear the looming storm of Jackson's karmic teenage payback on the horizon.
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